PISA 2009 - Performance of U. S. 15-Year-Old Students in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy in an International Context

The performance of U.S. 15-year-old students improved in science, regained lost ground in mathematics, and held steady in reading, according to the results of an international assessment released today by the National Center for Education Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education.

The report, Highlights From PISA 2009: Performance of U. S. 15-Year-Old Students in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy in an International Context, compares the performance of U.S. 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics, and science literacy to the performance of their peers internationally.

PISA, or the Program for International Student Assessment, is designed to assess what students have learned – both inside and outside of school – as they near the end of compulsory schooling, and how well they apply that knowledge in real-world contexts. Some 69 percent of the U.S. students sampled for PISA are tenth-graders. PISA is coordinated by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization made up of 34 mostly industrialized member countries such as the United States, Japan, Germany, Korea, and the United Kingdom. Some non-OECD member countries, such as Brazil, as well as non-national education systems like Shanghai and Dubai, also participated in the administration of PISA 2009.

Other key findings from PISA 2009 include the following:

• In reading literacy, the U.S. average score (500) was not measurably different from the OECD average (493) or scores from previous PISA assessments. Among the 33 other OECD countries, 6 had higher average scores than the United States, 13 had lower average scores, and 14 had average scores not measurably different from the U.S. average.

• U.S. students performed higher than the OECD average on reading items that required them to reflect and evaluate, but not measurably different on items requiring that they access and retrieve information or integrate and interpret what they had read.

• Across all countries, female students scored higher than male students in reading literacy. In the United States, the gender difference was smaller than that for OECD countries on average.

• In mathematics literacy in 2009, the U.S. average score (487) was lower than the OECD average score (496). Among the 33 other OECD countries, 17 had higher average scores than the United States, 5 had lower average scores, and 11 had average scores not measurably different from the U.S. average.
• A lower percentage of U.S. students scored at or above higher-order proficiency benchmarks in mathematics literacy than the OECD average. Math scores improved from 2006 but were not measurably different from scores on the 2003 assessment.

• In science literacy in 2009, the U.S. average score (502) was not measurably different from the OECD average (501). Among the 33 other OECD countries, 12 had higher average scores than the United States, 9 had lower average scores, and 12 had average scores that were not measurably different.

• For science, the U.S. average score in 2009 was higher than the U.S. average score in 2006, the only time point to which PISA 2009 performance can be compared in science literacy. The gain means that the U.S. science performance is no longer below the OECD average.

NCES’s PISA 2009 report provides international comparisons of average performance in reading literacy and three reading literacy subscales and in mathematics literacy and science literacy; average scores by gender for the United States and other countries, and by student race/ethnicity and school socioeconomic contexts within the United States; the percentages of students reaching PISA proficiency levels, for the United States and the OECD countries on average; and trends in U.S. performance over time.

Supplemental tables on the NCES website include additional data from PISA 2009, including the percentages of students in all PISA countries reaching the PISA proficiency levels and information on trends in performance around the world in reading, mathematics, and science.

The International Data Explorer also now includes PISA 2009 data for the 65 participating countries and education systems and PISA 2000 reading literacy data.

For more information about PISA 2009 results and about PISA